You can spend a lifetime trying to get over your issues so that you can get what you want—and arguably no one’s life has perhaps been more a living testament to that than mine and no place has that been more true than in my career.
Back when I was struggling to quit cocaine and drinking, I’d think, “If I could just quit, I wouldn’t have any problems anymore.” (This was a foreshadowing of the conviction, five years later, that if only I sold my book to a major publisher, I’d be happy for the rest of my life. What I learned then was that, for me, selling a book only set off the phenomenon of craving so that all I wanted to do after was sell another.)
When I first got sober, I thought I had, indeed, conquered all that I’d grappled with. I was happy! I was free not only from the constant cravings and desire to hole myself up at home with only cats and cocaine for company but also from the depression and moodiness I’d grown accustomed to living with. Though I’d been in therapy since the age of 16, I suddenly decided I didn’t need it. Why would a thoroughly joyful person need to sit down with a professional for 50 minutes a week, paying that person to listen to her problems when she had no problems? Wheee! I was free. I went to meetings and made new friends and faced issues I’d spent my entire life avoiding and went to coffee and dinner and parties where I never wanted to drink. I was free.
And then. Crash. Turns out that sobriety, while the beginning of my road to peace and happiness, wasn’t the entire trip. I was still, after all, me. Back to therapy I went; I still had the brain that thought vats of cocaine and gallons of Amstel Lights were a good idea. I still struggled with occasionally feeling like the proverbial piece of crap in the center of the universe.
Because of these feelings, I started seeking external validation more than I ever had—which is saying something since I’d been an external validation seeker my whole life. While of course there isn’t a human alive not after those proverbial pats on the back, let’s just I’ve just always been really human in this way.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get validation through your career—unless it becomes a dependency and you don’t handle dependency well. Besides, when it came to my career, I had a number of things mixed up that I had to straighten out before I could get what I wanted.
First there was the conviction I mentioned up top—that I was sure that achieving certain things would deliver me everlasting bliss. The initial problem with that, of course, is that, well, the universe isn’t McDonald’s—or (if you live in LA) Café Gratitude: you don’t get to just place your order and have it delivered. This meant that I couldn’t cling to a specific outcome—I had to go after what I wanted but then accept that the universe was usually going to give me something different (often something better).
I first realized this when I was newly sober, after I made amends to an editor who had fired me from a magazine job years earlier. He told me he wanted to hire me back—this time as a high-profile columnist. There was one other person he was considering for the job, he said, but he was really leaning toward me. I was thrilled; this was clearly an example of the cash and prizes sobriety would start regularly delivering to me.
And then he called a few weeks later and told me that they’d decided to go with the other girl. I started to do what I felt the situation demanded—cry and feel sorry for myself—but then I remembered what was being drilled into my head regularly in recovery: that everything happened the way it was supposed to, that rejection was the universe’s protection and that all I had to do was surrender to whatever was happening.
In that moment, everything changed. I told him I understood and I did. Within a month, I was hired by a magazine I’d loved for years—for a far better job than the one my former boss had been considering me for. Over the course of my career, this sort of thing has happened countless times and while I’ve often forgotten to surrender in the moment and thus reacted horribly and felt sorry for myself, one thing has remained consistent: when I have been able to walk myself through the process of remembering to go with what the world is giving me, everything works out better than I could have planned it. And most of my best career opportunities have been things I never sought out at all but were hand-delivered—usually after I’d suffered some crushing disappointment of not getting something else I’d convinced myself would provide everlasting happiness.
That hasn’t been the only issue I’ve needed to sort out, however. There’s also been a hell of a lot of defiance for me to contend with.
I’d always been defiant in terms of dealing with authority figures but only if I felt someone who had power over me wasn’t worthy of my respect. I was convinced, from pretty much out of the womb, that in order to have my respect, you had to earn it. This is simply not true. This is simply my ego at work, wanting to prove I know more than whomever it is I’ve decided isn’t worthy of being in charge of me. Simply put, there are hordes of people I need to show respect for if I want to succeed; decreeing someone in a superior position not worthy of my respect only hurts me.
The first bit of trouble I remember running into over this was with a history teacher I had in sixth grade, appropriately named Mr. Mein, who would harangue us endlessly about how we just needed to work harder. The truth, however, was that he was a terrible teacher and no matter how hard I worked, I could never please him. All the other kids seemed fine handling his awfulness but I spoke back—constantly showing him that I didn’t respect him and trying to make him look foolish in front of the rest of the class.
And how did that go? Well, I got a D in that class. Who really won there?
The pattern I established with Mr. Mein resurfaced again and again in my career, until I realized that by focusing entirely on myself to the exclusion of everyone else, allowing my ego to make my decisions, acting on my fear, convincing myself I was a victim and not practicing self-love—in short, not dealing with the defects that were causing me to behave in a certain way—I was continuing to sabotage myself.
I’m still learning new ways to get out of my own way so I can continue to have the career I want. It’s definitely a process. And I occasionally need people to remind me that these achievements aren’t going to provide the everlasting happiness my brain tells me they will. They’ll do it for a short time—until my insatiable brain sets its sights somewhere else. Like I said, it’s a process. But if it were easy, as the saying goes, it wouldn’t be worth having. Hard work pays off; it’s just not the kind of hard work people like Mr. Mein told me I needed to do.
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